This is a tender and carefully written story about a young boy forced to spend a summer with this distant father in rural Pakistan, in the hopes that it will toughen him up and prepare him to help run the family estate.
Overall, it was definitely a solid debut, and some of the sentences drew me in. The descriptions of nature and land being particularly beautiful.

The best parts of the novel were definitely the, aforementioned, tender scenes in which some of the characters interacted with one another. It is very much a story about fathers and sons, and just family in general. I loved the scenes between Fahad and his father, Rafik. Rafik shares some memories with his son, and is surprised by the fact that these memories are suddenly coming back to him, as well as the urge to speak about them. Memories haunt all of the characters, and Soomro writes these flashbacks in lovely, dreamlike prose.

The aspect that did not quite work for me was the fact that the part of the novel set during Fahad's "life-changing" teenage years felt quite short. The later parts of the book, which I will not spoil, were definitely quite emotional. Soomro tackled child/parent relationships beautifully, and really captured the idea of looking at your parents in a different way once you have grown older. Compared to this, the first part seemed slightly less convincing. I would have loved some more exploration of the relationship between Fahad and Ali.

However, I have very little to complain about. This story really demanded my attention. I will definitely keep an eye out for whatever Soomro publishes in the future!

Thank you very much for the review copy.

This debut novel, published earlier this month, has been touted as one that might feature on prize lists, so before today’s Booker Prize longlist announcement, here’s my review.

Billed as a story about a boy’s life-changing summer in rural Pakistan, Other Names For Love is really more a story of fathers and sons. Actually, I would say the novel is to fathers and sons what Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi was to mothers and daughters - difficult filial relationships, dementia, parental expectations and family duty. I wasn’t a fan of Burnt Sugar but I did quite like this one.

Sixteen year old Karachi native Fahad is hoping to spend a summer in London with his mother, dining out and going to the theatre, but his father Rafik, a landowner and powerful politician, has other ideas.

Rafik takes Fahad to the family farm in Abad in rural Pakistan to “make a man” of his sensitive son. Fahad is guided by local boy Ali, for whom he develops feelings.

Years later, Fahad returns to Pakistan to assist his mother when his father has brought the family to the brink of financial ruin through his reckless pursuit of political power. Vowing to help his mother by ensuring the sale of the farm in Abad, Fahad has conflicting emotions on his return there, recalling his coming-of-age summer.

Beautifully descriptive, lyrical, literary prose and oblique storytelling lend this book a slightly dreamy quality, meaning some will love it but others will be frustrated or bored by it. For me, I’m on the fence.

I enjoyed the writing to a point, but felt as though it obscured what was a very decent story and rendered interesting characters impenetrable. The book skimmed over the entire middle period of Fahad’s life which just it didn’t sit right with me.

In short, a beautifully written debut but not without its shortcomings from a reader’s perspective. 3/5⭐️

*Many thanks to the publisher @vintagebooks @penguinrandomhouse who contacted me in May and provided me with an eARC via @netgalley. As always, this is an honest review.*

Thank you to the publisher for inviting me to review this title.

It was refreshing to read about a queer experience from a culture that's so different from my own. However, there is still much here that is so universally human that almost anyone can relate to Fahad, like the complex layers of your identity, the push and pull between you and your parents (they love you, and they're disappointed in you, and they're proud of you, and, and...), as well as the overwhelming feeling of otherness that many queer people live with, even after they move somewhere more accepting (you're too gay, or too foreign, or too whatever wherever you go). <i>Other Names for Love</i> really digs deep into all these gray areas of our relationships, and isn't afraid to leave questions unanswered. Relationships often don't have neat story arcs or easy conclusions, and it was both comforting and frustrating to relate to Fahad's experiences with his family and friends.

We follow Fahad first as a teenager in Pakistan and then meet him again as an adult in England. I liked that young Fahad and adult Fahad have distinctive voices, but I have to admit that I started to enjoy the book in earnest when we got to adult Fahad's experiences. I think I might have connected to teenage Fahad better if the story had started at an earlier point in time, with us experiencing with him the initial disappointment that sets the story in motion.

In addition to Fahad, we get to see events from his father Rafik's perspective. I get the symmetry there - hearing from a father and a son - but I would have preferred to also read some chapters from Fahad's mother's perspective, as well as his boyfriend's.

A refreshing story about family love, loyalty and desires. Many aspects of love all rolled up into this outpouring. Extremely moving and eye opening to how the loyalties of family life can affect every other part of it.
This lovely story just breathes a new voice into the world and I was totally captivated. Highly recommended read.

This story slowly unveils as we watch what happens when sexuality is hidden behind layers of secrets. Without giving much anyway in the story, the gentle innocence of childhood is slowly replaced by the knowingness of adulthood, where family secrets are gently and slowly revealed.

I read through this book very quickly, getting caught up in the story and its gentle rhythms which all build to a powerful end.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a hypnotic debut novel surrounding a boy’s life-changing summer in rural Pakistan that explores a story surrounding both a father and son and the consequences of desire.

I’m trying my best to explore different genres and cultures when it comes to reading as well as discovering new authors and debut novels. This book ticks both of those and I am so excited to get stuck in.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

This is an astonishing debut and I feel sure we’ll hear more of Taymour Soomro. I do like to explore books and genres and Other Names for Love really took me on a journey, literally and figuratively. It’s a story about father and son relationships, self discovery, social and cultural differences and much, much more.

The writing is elegant and powerful. Soomro is able to create verbal pictures and I soon felt totally immersed in a land and culture about which I know very little. It’s colourful and the two central characters fit the picture perfectly. These scenes contrasted sharply with the later sections where Fahad, the son has settled in London and is leading a very different life to the one his father had planned for him. It’s a difficult book to explain because it works at so many levels. It’s a family story in that it covers events over some years, but it’s also a tale of one man’s life and how he was shaped by those around and his own make up. It’s just beautifully told and I really loved every part. Sweeping and focussed, old ways and the call of the west, father and son…it’s filled with contrasts and emotion. I’ll be looking for more from this author and success will be richly deserved.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

This is an extraordinary novel: utterly brilliant and hauntingly beautiful. The author has captured the emotions that bring father and son together whilst also tearing them apart perfectly. The taboos of not upholding family traditions and also seeking love from another man are handled with sensitivity and pathos. The writing shimmers with an electric energy that tingles with sheer brilliance.

This one wasn’t for me unfortunately.

The book concentrates on the relationship between a father and son in Pakistan. Told from both view points and from two different periods in their lives, the first half of the book is set when the son is 16 and planning to go to London with his mother for the summer. His father has other ideas and hauls him off to their huge farm many miles away to try and make a man of him. It’s here that he has an early voyage of discovery.
The second half is set decades later where the son has been living in London since that summer and is summoned home by his mother as his father is starting to lose his memory and his mind, but has also lost all his money and soon the family home.

As I say this one wasn’t for me. I found the writing style and format quite jarring. There seemed a real lack of focus and discipline in the writing. I also found the dialogue exceptionally clunky to read. Maybe it’s a cultural thing but I did have to reread a lot of what they were saying to try and make sense of it.

There wasn’t enough meat on the bone of any of the characters for me to have any empathy with them. The story just didn’t work for me. It seemed unfocused, chapters seemed unfinished. We jumped from one situation to another without resolution of the previous. I just couldn’t connect with this book at all.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC through Netgalley.

Overall it was a fast, consuming read that had unique and notable characters, a steady and intense storyline, and a decent pace to the switching narrations-however they did at times seem to not flow between one another well, the different narrations became still and jarring and could’ve gelled better together,
The descriptions of the places the characters went through were very extremely vivid and memorable, the dialogue realistic and natural.
I feel that this queer narration of a troubled gay man returning home years later or writing about the past years later is almost overdone-although I do love this concept, a queer man changed forever by his teenager years that he’s now telling us about, discussing his first forbidden love or the tragic end to a bittersweet, naive crush or his abusive relationship with parents and the lonely solace he found in a strange boy, I think that this novel done it well enough and original enough that it didn’t feel stale or rehashed from other successful queer coming of age novels and movies.
I also feel that it wasn’t predicable in the way the story unravelled, but I do think the characters could’ve been developed more because they didn’t entice any emotions out of me and they didn’t seem to have enough life to them.
It was that of a supporting character I was more invested in-the story of Mousey and who this man he lived with was. I was already wanting to read that more when I skimmed the blurb, so I’m glad my prediction of this character was correct in being my main consummation.
I do think the two main boys and the development of their attraction was done pretty well-it had time to development nicely and wasn’t rushed through too much. I also thought the perspective of the father was done quite well, his voice was very different and recognisable as a mature man compared to a hopeful young boy. I also thought that referring to “the boy” instead of his son’s name added a strange and consuming curiousness to it.
Overall it was a decent and quick read that had a good pace and storyline, with excellent descriptions of the places featured, but could’ve spent a little more time developing those characters in those places.

This is the debut novel from a Pakistan born, Cambridge, Stanford Law School educated writer (who also was a PhD student on the UEA Creative Writing Course).

He has explained part of the genesis to the novel, in a Guardian interview, as “About 15 years ago, I wrote a novel so terrible and unpublishable that no one will ever see it. Having failed as a writer, I didn’t really know what to do. I wanted to run and hide and so I ran home to Pakistan and hid there with my family. But I also wanted to be useful and productive. Our farm has been in the family for generations. When I returned, my grandfather was managing it. He had been doing this for 40 years alongside his career first as a civil servant and later as a politician. I was curious about farming, about how it was done, about how it might be done better; though my grandfather was keen for me to restart my legal career, he taught me the logistics of seeds and tractors, harvests, threshing and crop-sharing.” - although as the Acknowledgements to the book makes clear the one missing character is his benevolent Grandfather.

The book opens (and for the first 100 pages or so is set) some decades ago, on a train journey from Karachi to the northern Sindh town of Abad – the 16 year old Fahad is travelling their with his rather despotic politician-farmer father Rafik who runs the family farm in the area. Years before when Rafik’s father died, his Uncle (Father’s brother) took over his Father’s political seat but gave Rafik the control farm (and half its revenue) which over years he improved and turned into more of a patriarchal/feudal holding accompanied by a largely tied vote so gaining political office.

Rafik’s cousin (Rafik’s recently deceased Uncle’s Son) and childhood friend who he nicknamed then and still calls “Mousey” has returned from London (where he lived for years) and determined to take back half of the farm – despite the active opposition and sabotage of Fahad who calls in the loyalty his years of largesse have earned him.

It is Fahad’s first visit since he was circumcised as an infant – he normally spends his term times in Karachi and his Summer’s in London with his mother, but his father in simple terms feels he needs to revisit his family’s roots and (in crude terms) “man-up” (spending too much time with his mother and acting at school). When Rafik decides a key part of the latter is linking Fahad up with Ali the brooding 17 year old son of a local landlord and businessman, there is an inevitability to the narrative trajectory of this section.

The third party narrative is effectively split between Rafik and Fahad. Fahad’s scenes are very descriptive, with both a palpable sense of the flies, colours and heat of the countryside, and with an atmosphere both of mystery (as he recalls an incident with a mysterious catlike creature at a local shrine) and self discovery (as he works through his feelings for Ali); Rafik’s by contrast seem slightly caricatured.

In the second section of the novel, after Mousey’s death we see Rafik’s political rise to national and even international prominence and a visit he makes to London to see his son, who was seemingly banished there after his trip to Abad but who has settled into an openly gay and well connected life there – Rafik and Fahad meeting in an awkward restaurant encounter. This section feels far too brief – and I had the impression of a well known short story writer struggling to fully commit to the novel form. However from the Guardian interview this seems a deliberate if not entirely confident decision

“I had been writing a lot of short fiction. I shifted to writing the novel as part of a PhD, and my supervisor kept reading the chapters and telling me that they felt like short stories. Her argument, which I still don’t know I completely agree with, is that the energy of a sentence in a short story is different to the energy of a sentence in a novel – that, somehow, the sense of imminent foreclosure in a short story feeds down even to the level of a sentence. I thought, why don’t I separate the novel into parts so they feel like novellas? It also engaged with the way I wanted to tell the story. I wanted to show these men at very different stages of power in their lives.”

The third part of the novel moves forward in time – Fahad now a successful and award winning novelist in a stable relationship in England, receives an unexpectedly panicked call from his mother. Rafik whose political star has long waned, and whose mental faculties are dimmed, has mortgaged the family home past the point where he can sustain payments and she wants Fahad to return to Pakistan and sell the family farm in Abad. His trip there as well as showing him the passage of time for both his father and the farm and countryside also forces him to revisit his memories of his previous time there and think again about Ali.

There are some nice and quite subtle touches in this section – for example some parallels between what happened to Fahad and what happened to Mousey and perhaps a hint that Rafik may also have been involved.

There is also an excellent but understated scene when the senile and now close to destitute Rafik shares his wife’s lunch with the birds “they knew him well enough— even the sparrows, even the mynahs hopped nearer. He scraped the entire dish of rice into an earthenware platter in the centre of the terrace so that it became a giant mound, so that grains spilled out onto the rough sandstone tiles.” – a clever echo I felt of his previous role as landowner and patriarch handing out sweets to children and money and food to their fathers.

I also liked the way that we gain only some hints of Fahad’s life between his two trips to Abad and the ways in which his time there has impacted on his life, rather than this being spelled out too obviously.

What by contrast starts off well but I think is overdone is Fahad’s job as a fictional author – which as well as being far too obvious a choice for a main character in a debut novel, became rather over-laboured and self-referential.

For example even before he travels we see

“In the student’s story, a girl was raped in a field by an itinerant worker. The group discussed in detail how the student had choreographed the scene, and Fahad found himself remembering Abad again— the water thick as mud, the grey rocky earth, the dust that clouded up around you as you walked so that you appeared from it as if conjured by a sandstorm— but each thought shimmered both with warning and with poetry, luring him nearer like the dashing rocks of the Symplegades. What if, he wondered, for a terrible moment, he’d written nothing in so long because he hadn’t written this, because he’d written always so far away from himself, as though tossing a grenade?”

And when his friends hear of the relationships of his Uncle, father and cousin they exclaim “Fahad should write about it, someone said. It was like something out of Tolstoy“ – which is a little too obvious for a book which both from blurb and the author’s “what I am reading” is partly a rewrite of “Fathers and Sons” by Turgenev.

Interestingly there are lots of overlaps between this book and the one I read previously – Kamila Shamsie’s “Best of Friends” including a youthful incident involving an older boy leading to an involuntary exile which then becomes a more permanent and deliberate one, and characters that move in establishment circles in the UK and Pakistan, but with the memory of the incident ever present. I did feel this was the much stronger book, although neither was really entirely to my liking because of the establishment setting.

But a promising debut and one that I think may well feature on literary prize lists – perhaps with the author being as successful as his character.

Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro is a captivating story of an ambitious political businessman / farmer and his relationship with his creative and more cosmopolitan son during different periods of their lives.

The story begins with Fahad aged 16 travelling by train from Karachi to Abad where his father Rafik has successfully bui!t a stately house and a vast farm from an inhospitable piece of land left to him by his own father.

Fahad feels out of place in Abad as his father ruthlessly manages his businesses and spends time meeting important people and with his cousin, that is until he meets Ali and they become close friends.

There are only a handful of central characters in the story which really focuses the narrative but limits our understanding of Fahad's character beyond his relationship with Ali. We get much more of a picture of Rafik through his interactions with staff and cousins. Fahad seems to have fallen into a more normal/ western lifestyle before having to return to Abad years later.

Soomro's writing style is distinctive, lapsing into the lyrical from time to time. I feel I need to reread the book to fully appreciate all that it contains.

Other Names for Love is an utterly beautiful, beguiling novel. In 3 parts it tells the story of Fahad as his father Rafik, a powerful politician and landowner, introduced him to Abad, their huge farm in rural Pakistan.
In the first section, Fahad is a teenager and Rafik hopes to toughen him up and face his future responsibilities. Instead he meets a local boy and a friendship develops which changes Fahad’s life for ever.
In the 2nd section Rafik visits Fahad in London where he lives life as an openly gay man, distanced from his previous life and Pakistani roots.
In the 3rd section, Fahad returns to help his parents after they have fallen on hard times. To survive they must sell the farm, so Fahad and Rafik make a fateful journey back to Abad.
This books is beautifully written and kept me absorbed, however there is something about the structure which doesn’t allow the characters to fully develop . It’s didn’t quite work as a whole and was ultimately rather disappointing in the end. I wanted to know more about Fahad’s life and character and we just didn’t get that. It was all a little disjointed. Taymoor Soomro is a fine writer though and I’m sure there are many more fine novels to come.

At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad. the family's rural estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family - to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive. Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and it's inhabitants: the people who revere or revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

This is a thought provoking read with well developed characters. The story is told from different points of view. It tells of things we struggle to talk about and explain. The story is told with a dual timeline, Fahad at age sixteen, then Fahad and Rafik many years later. I did find the story to be confusing and disjointed in places, and there was no real emotion.

I would like to thank #NetGalley #Vintage and the author #TaymarSoomro for my ARC of #OtherNamesForLove in exchange for an honest review.

This in parts is a complex book to read.
The story is based on Fahad who grows up in Pakistan with his father Rafik.
Fahad is a sensitive soul that doesn't match his fathers of how a man should be.
Rafik decides to try and toughen his son up and be more like a man rather than a acting more like a woman.

Fahad lives is adult life in London far away from his Pakistani roots, he is proud to be gay and doesn't suffer any judgments in the UK.
But when he has to return home to his family in Pakistan both Fahad and Rafik need to come to terms with their own issues.

Soomro's writing is gorgeous, and there's a tender, melancholic atmosphere that gives an almost tangible texture to the book. Abad in rural Pakistan is evoked meticulously so that we can smell and taste it from the sticky flies that get everywhere to the ice-cream sundaes with multi-coloured vermicelli in Greenlands. The fleeting love at the heart of the book feels imbued with the same haunting resonance as sixteen-year old Fahad experiences desire that never quite leave him.

Alongside this lyrical story is the more fractious relationship between Fahad, the sensitive, romance-reading son, and his more traditional father who wants to 'make a man' to inherit his family responsibilities. The push-pull of love and resistance between father and son, and between the generations, is handled with a kind of delicate robustness.

For all the good stuff, though, this feels like two or maybe three books crashed into one. It's always a hard sell to cram a life into a relatively short number of pages and here I loved the first 'volume' but struggled a bit with the swift time changes that sweep across the book chronologically. Something nearly always seems to get lost in the gaps, for me.

Nevertheless, this works beautifully on a sentence by sentence level and if the whole book had concentrated on what is section one here, I think I would have been a more satisfied reader. This kind of pushing everything into a debut seems such a common flaw in first novels - reviewers quite often highlight it, why aren't editors doing more to help writers shape their books more closely?

Overall, despite this not working wholly for me, Soomro is a wonderful writer - hopefully his next book will have a more assured shape to match the sensitive prose style. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

Not for me I'm afraid, I found it very hard to keep my attention on the story - a relationship between father and son, over the years, between Pakistan and the UK.

Pakistani author Taymour Soomro’s debut sees teenage Fahad very reluctantly accompanying his father to his upcountry farm estate in Abad, an area developed largely from jungle as his power-hungry father is keen to tell everyone. Fahad would rather spend his summer with his mother in London or Karachi but Rafik wants to toughen him up, show off his own power and influence in the area and present Fahad as the next generation.
Fahad is unable to fit into his father’s image of him. Things seem to improve when ex-London resident and Rafik’s cousin Mousey returns home but his motives challenge Rafik’s plans. A young man, Ali, is introduced to Fahad as a role model but Fahad finds himself attracted to him.
Tradition and the importance of family are two unsurprising themes here with those unable to sustain those values being swept aside. The characters are unable to express their feelings to one another causing long lasting frustration and resentment. Rafik’s need for power and prestige cannot allow anyone to stand in his way.
The story is well told and there are some lovely moments especially in the interactions between characters, Fahad with the “young thug” Ali and also with his aging father in the latter stages of the novel but for me it did not have the resonance I was expecting.
The author switches from father to son’s perspective within the third person narrative and there are jumps in time which gives a jerky, disjointed feel at times which sometimes I can actually appreciate in novels but here I think it affects the reader’s relationships with the characters.
I didn’t feel that I knew the characters well enough. There is so much potential within the cast here, Rafik, Fahad, the mother, father’s cousin Mousey and Ali have all potential to blend into something outstanding but I felt the author was only allowing me to have a superficial understanding of them as if something was being held back. I felt this particularly with main character Fahad, on this occasion leaving the reader to fill in the gaps influences the reader’s response to him. I felt I wasn’t being pulled in to the novel as consistently as I could have been.
I do feel however that Taymour Soomro has provided us with a very visual work and there are considerable poignant, subtle scenes. A TV/film adaptation could work very well indeed incorporating these beautiful small moments within the novel into a visual narrative.
Other Names For Love is published by Harvill Secker on 7th July 2022. Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Beautifully written, totally absorbing, a complicated relationship between father and son ( when are the not? ) in Pakistan with European influences. Makes your heart cry and smile.

I found it fascinating, riveting, well told and lyrical. A story about coming of age, about discovering a land and people. Different POVs, great characters and storytelling.
The author delivers a fascinating story where not all is said in a fascinating and nearly hypnotic way.
An excellent book that i loved.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine